YSK that Gerrymandering allows politicians to determine election outcomes by changing electoral maps. In most western countries, it's illegal. Gerrymandering is common in the United States
Gerrymandering should be a crime and conviction should mean removal from office and a life long ban on working in politics.
Now we just need a way to do that that isn't vigilante violence.
It is kind of frustrating how every system needs to resist people (usually conservatives) from acting in bad faith.
Now we just need a way to do that
I have some ideas.
that isn't vigilante violence.
Oh. Nevermind...
VV is a last step, for when the system has evolved into an unmovable corner.
Like when you play tic tac toe and all moves are done, you have to just restart. Eventually, you have to do something different to get a different outcome. Unfortunately if you fuck up your memory (bad history and bad education), you're doomed to fail until you get it right or die.
So, yeah, we need to figure out the right way to do it. Until then and if they don't let us, flip the damn table.
Supposedly there was a bill a few years ago to ban it that narrowly failed.
At this point maybe the best bet would be for blue states to enter the gerrymandering arms race on a conditional basis; do it as blatantly as it's being done on the other side, with some explicit clause that it will end when fair representation is implemented nationwide.
I just read an article this morning (tried to find it to link here but couldn't) that was talking about how it will be more difficult for Dems to lean into this strategy because most of the blue states already have independent committees to draw districts (as they should.) It basically pointed to California as our sole bastion of hope for 2026 and noted that if a bunch of the states follow suit, the Republicans will have the edge. Continues to come down to the electoral college problem with small states getting disproportionate voices.
That assumes the democratic party wants gerrandering to end and they just won't collude with the Republicans to carve up the country and entrench the two party system.
Some states have anti-gerrimandering written into their constitutions, so that would not be easy.
In order to do that, we need a rigorous definition of gerrymandering that isn't just "I know it when I see it." Even if we try to adopt some sort of strict mathematical criteria and algorithm for redistricting (such as optimizing for "compactness" using a Voronoi algorithm), there would always still be some amount of arbitrary human input that could be gamed (such as the location of seeds, in this example). Even if we went so far as to make a rule that everything must be randomized (which would possibly be bad for things like continuity of representation, by the way), we could still end up with people trying to influence the outcome by re-rolling the dice until they got a result they liked.
It's a hard (in both the computational sense and political sense) problem to solve.
Gerrymandering is a crime. We just don't consider what's going on to be legally gerrymandering for some bullshit fuck ass reason. There's only been a few cases of gerrymandering being caught in a legal sense. It is largely ignored.
edit: a bit wrong here but whaddya know it's because our laws are not transparent
This issue is actually pretty weird. Racial gerrymandering is a violation of the voting rights act, hence illegal. Partisan gerrymandering is completely legal.
In practice this seems to mean that it is harder to gerrymander in states where racial voting patterns align with party, e.g. whites vote Republican, blacks vote Democrat. In states where party lines do not predominantly fall on racial lines, you can hack up the districts to favor your party as much as you like.
If our laws were transparent how would anyone read them
How would you prove it? That's actually a question that needs an answer
Some of these are absolutely insane
Ah, the minority locator.
That first one is no longer like that, but according to Wikipedia was done by the Democrats.
It's a complex issue as well, because it's not always done for nefarious reasons. If say 20% of a city is black, they might bundle them up so that they end up with one black guy and four white guys running the city, rather than the 5 white guys that would come from a "fairer" distribution.
But it's all just window dressing on the fact that first past the post systems aren't fit for purpose. If I vote for something, I want that counted at all levels up to the national level, not just thrown away because my particular group of streets doesn't like it.
🎵how insane can you go?🎶
I request all districts are now Penrose tiled using the Einstein hat!
They are so insane they inspired art: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wU8H-Ts_rfA
While I do agree, the difficulty is plausible deniability. If you want people with something in common to have a voice, perhaps a suburban ring around an urban core is a fair choice that looks like one of these.
I’m sure it’s not, but that could happen and whatever rule should allow that possibility. This is why it’s not easy to set a clear rule or a clear determination. Now it’s case by case and up to the judicial branch.
Perhaps setting a speed limit would go a long way - you can only redistrict on certain large changes such as the census every ten years and it can’t go into effect without judicial review, without all the appeals being exhausted. In this case Texas doesnt seem to have a legitimate reason to redistrict, and was it Georgia last year trying to argue that they had to use the new map for an election despite it being likely illegal
What's even more unfair is area based voting, where your individual vote doesn't count to affect the government, you instead vote for a local representative which in turn effects the government. Your vote for president or prime minister should be direct, not a postcode lottery even without gerrymandering.
I don't think tiered representation is bad if 1: every person's vote is equal regardless of zip code 2: you have instant recall and can just have a representative replaced if they vote against their constituency wishes.
What your describing is called a Republic. There are several benefits to such a model.
The most relevant was well summarized in MIB as "a person is smart, people are stupid". A simple direct democracy is great until you are relying on an uninformed population to make a time-critical decision that requires expertise. If we instead elect people who are then expected to use tax dollars to consult experts, and then represent our interests by voting accordingly, we can theoretically avoid problems (such as the tragedy of the commons).
The downside happens when the representative takes advantage of the public's ignorance, fosters it, and wields it for personal/oligarchic gain. Ideally the people are just smart enough to see that happening and vote them out before it becomes a systemic issue...
Just FYI, this use of republic is not recognised in political science and as far as I've seen is only used by americans justifying why their system is undemocratic. Republic just comes from "res Publica" (public affair) and means the head of state is not a monarch but a member of the public. There are very democratic republics like Finland and there are very undemocratic republics like the PRC. The way you describe a republic would apply to countries like the UK or Sweden, which are constitutional monarchies, not republics.
Representative democracy is a better term for what you are talking about, where the population elects representatives who are able to advocate for them and take the time to become subject matter experts on running the country (idealy).
Or even better, the position of president or prime minister should have little power.
You don't want that. France tried that, a couple of times, it didn't work. Government ended up deadlocked and falling every 6 months. Our 5th republic granted more power to the presidency, and now it's a little better.
What you do want, however, is the head of state and the head of government to be two distinct persons. Which is not the case in the USA.
In theory the US Federal govt should be split into branches so that it has power, but the checks and balances between branches prevent any single branch from dominating. Which sucks when all 3 branches collude to hand all the power to the executive branch, which then wields the Federal govt to dominate the states.
For the record, a similar system where the states remain separate with a centralized governing body, but with less power than a Federalist one is called a Confederacy...so yeah, we tried that in the US once too. On the flip side, Switzerland's Confederation seems to be working out pretty great for them.
When the Senate's full of cucks, they let you do it
I mean, you could go the other way. Presidencies are bad on their face and the chief executive should be promoted from the party with a legislative majority (ie, Parliamentary system).
Then go after single representative districts and the obscenely high constituent to representative ratios.
Area based voting is a necessity for electing a local representative. But it shouldn't apply for national elections, on that I agree. The US is the only country I know of that applies area based voting in national elections.
And the UK, as the parliament is made up of local representatives. They should be two different people.
That is the Westminster system. It's fine in that the head of the executive only has power so long as they have the confidence of the elected members. If the elected members lose confidence then the government falls. The government is the house, so your vote does directly influence the government on either the government or opposition side. Don't get too jealous of the American system - it's a bloody mess in its own right.
The Government isn’t the house, it’s the around 140 ministers appointed by the PM, drawn from both houses, plus the whips. Opposite them is the opposition frontbench, which is the leader of the opposition and the shadow cabinet, and their whips. Everyone else in the Commons from those two parties are backbenchers.
the gop loves to use the 4th one, which always fucks up dem voters, and thats where you see voter turnout problems. plus they also suppress votes in the areas they control which has significant D voters too.
Your vote for president or prime minister
The whole reason a prime minister is different from a president is that they're not elected by direct votes. They're the leader of the party with the most representatives (more or less).
Why even have the system with districts? Just calculate all the votes and see who wins? If you live in a place where most people vote x, why even bother to vote y. Your vote will go straight in the bin.
just one of the many reasons you see such consistent low turnouts in american elections
The idea was that you get direct representation - your representative should be focused on your issues and the issues plaguing people in your district. But it breaks down today because politicians in the US just vote with their party.
The American political system was designed for weak parties, and geographical representation above all, in a political climate where there were significant cultural differences between regions.
The last time we updated the core rules around districting (435 seats divided as closely to proportionally as possible among the states, with all states being guaranteed at least one seat, in single member districts) was in 1929, when we had a relatively weak federal government, very weak political parties, before the rise of broadcasting (much less national broadcasting, or national television, or cable TV networks, or universal phone service, or internet, or social media). We had 48 states. The population was about 120 million, and a substantial number of citizens didn't actually speak English at home.
And so it was the vote for the person that was the norm. Plenty of people could and did "switch parties" to vote for the candidate they liked most. Parties couldn't expel politicians they didn't like, so most political issues weren't actually staked out by party line.
But now, we have national parties where even local school governance issues look to the national parties for guidance. And now the parties are strong, where an elected representative is basically powerless to resist even their own party's agenda. And a bunch of subjects that weren't partisan have become partisan. All while affiliations with other categories have weakened: fewer ethnic or religious enclaves, less self identity with place of birth, more cultural homogenization between regions, etc.
So it makes sense to switch to a party-based system, with multi member districts and multiple parties. But that isn't what we have now, and neither side wants to give up the resources and infrastructure they've set up to give themselves an advantage in the current system.
Another thing was that in the past it wasn't actually possible to properly coordinate parties. Communications technology just wasn't there. I'm sure every congressman had a high-tech "telephone" in their house, but they weren't always home, and there certainly weren't answering machines.
More importantly, mass media wasn't there either. People knew their reps from local town halls and canvassing. They weren't bombarded with mass media featuring the president or the party leader. Sure, they'd show up in newspapers, but not audio/video. So, that meant that congressional reps had a lot more "fame" in their districts, and the leaders had a lot less. So, that gave the reps more independence.
Money also was less of a factor. It's always been a problem with US democracy, but national parties didn't have a stranglehold over their members because of money like they do today.
Mainly because these jerryrigged districts are counting on you not voting in order for them to work.
Ideally, your Reps are supposed to be local, so states are supposed to be divided up into relatively equal populations where the citizens have similar economic and social demographics so they get equitable representation of their local issues at a federal level.
Personally, I think we need a law where voting districts are limited by complexity. Create a law that establishes a maximum perimeter-to-area ratio for congressional districts, and also mandates that the most and least populous districts must be within 10% of eachother's population.
Mandelbrot has entered the chat
i did a big ol post here about this
generally what you’re talking about is proportional representation… systems like this tend to lead to a government comprised of a lot of minor parties, which sounds great!
but it has its down sides (and i’m not saying 2 party is much better, but it’s useful to be aware of the situations it creates): when there are a lot of minor parties with no clear “above 50%” majority, they have to form a coalition government and that can be extremely fragile
you can’t hold parties to election promises, because you just don’t know what they’re going to have to give up to form a coalition, and even if they do end up forming a coalition you really don’t know how stable that coalition is going to be!
i guess in the US there’s gridlock anyway, so what the hell right? may as well at least have gridlock with parties blocking legislation based on things you believe in… buuuuuuut that’s probably a bad example: first past the post is far more to blame in that case than proportional vs representative democracy
(fptp leads to extremism, ranked choice etc leads to moderation because people’s 2nd, 3rd, etc choice matters: you want to be likeable not just to your “base” but to everyone, because everyone’s vote has a chance of flowing through to you even if you’re not their first choice… if people hate you, you’re not going to get those preference votes when candidates get eliminated)
i guess in the US there’s gridlock anyway, so what the hell right?
Historically there were many compromises where representatives worked with the other party to find a solution they could all agree to. We like to think that’s how politics work.
However over the last few years it’s gotten much more divisive. Currently it seems like everything is a party line vote. It seems like one party especially elevated party loyalty above serving constituents, above doing the right thing. There is no more voice of the people, only the party and the evil orange overlord.
Filibusters have always been a thing, where you can hold the floor as long as you can talk about something, delaying everything. That was both a challenge for someone to do and had a huge impact when Congress had the motivation to do what they saw as right for their constituents. Now it’s automatic. You simply need to declare it. A majority vote is no longer enough for most choices because you always need the supermajority sufficient to overcome the filibuster, to “silence the representative “. Now you can’t get anything done.
For most of our history, Congress understood their highest priority was to pass a budget, and they did. Now that is no longer important. Brinksmanship means there is no longer a downside to hold the whole country hostage over whatever issue so they do. “Shutting down the government” by not passing a budget has become the new norm. Meaning we not only can’t get anything done but disrupt everything else.
You need districts because not every race is national. Sure it allocates electoral votes but also Congress-critters. When a state has multiple Representatives, who elects each?
Districts are good so that people with something in common are better represented. We do NOT want a “tyranny of the majority” where minorities have no voice.
Some amount of gerrymandering is good to create districts where people have something in common. But that’s the real problem: how to allow “good” complex shapes while prohibiting “bad” gerrymandering? How do you even define that?
Personally I thought there was some law connecting it to the census so that any changes are based on data, not political whims. However clearly not
this is proportional vs representative democracy
it’s a choice between which you value more: your ideals (proportional - lots of minor parties get elected who better represent your morals and what you want accomplished) or someone to represent the area you live in (representative - inevitably leads to, actually, MINORITY rule because the majority across most districts votes for the party that they hate least - partly because first past the post, but also because in individual districts parties need to get above 50% to win, and that’s just a hard ask for minor parties no matter the area you live)
The idea is to have state-wide races where parties, not individuals, compete. Let's take Washington State, as an example, because it has a nice and even 10 representatives. Instead of having district campaigns, you would have one big statewide election where each party puts up their best campaign, the people vote, and then the votes are counted on a statewide basis and tallied up. Let's say the results are in and are as follows:
For each 10% of the vote, that party gets allocated one seat. So Democrats get 4, Republicans get 2, and Libertarians get 1. The remaining 3 seats are doled out to whichever party has the largest remainder. So the Republicans and Greens with 8% get one more each, and the Working Families Party with 6% gets one. The Constitution Party and the independents will go home with zero seats.
The final distribution:
There are two ways of determining which exact people get to actually go and sit in Congress: open list or closed list. A closed list system means that the party publishes a list of candidates prior to the election, and the top N people on that list are elected, where N is the number of seats won by the party. A simple open list system would be that everyone on that party's list has their name actually appear on the ballot and a vote for them also counts as a vote for their party, then the top N people of that party with the most votes are elected, where N is the number of seats won by a party. In a closed list system, the party determines the order before the election (they can hold a primary). In an open list system, the voters determine the order on election day.
The main drawback of this system is that with a closed list system, the voters can't really "vote out" an unpopular politician who has the backing of their party since that party will always put them at the top of the list, and open list systems tend to have extremely long ballot papers (if each party here stood the minimum of 10 candidates and 10 independents also stood, that would be 70 candidates on the ballot). It also forces the election to be statewide which means smaller parties can't gain regional footholds by concentrating all their efforts on a small number of constituencies. Small parties in the US don't tend to do this anyway, but it is a fairly successful strategy in other countries, like the Bloc Québécois in Canada or the Scottish National Party in the UK. That being said, a proportional system would still increase the chance that smaller parties have of obtaining representation. Small parties in the US have almost invisible campaigns but if they took it seriously, they'd only need to get 10% of the vote to guarantee a seat, and even with 6-7% they'd still have a good shot at getting one, which on some years they almost do anyway even without a campaign.
The other drawback is that it eliminates the concept of a "local" representative (oddly-shaped and extremely large constituencies notwithstanding), so if a representative votes for a policy that is extremely unpopular in their constituency, it is less effective to "punish" them for it within that constituency as long as the candidate or their party is still popular statewide.
In my opinion there shouldn't be districts at all. Too much potential for fuckery.
The secret is that you need proportional elections within each district. What also implies that they should be bigger...
Or, in other words, just copy Switzerland and you'll be fine.
(Personally, I'm divided. The largest scale your election is, the most voice you give to fringe distributed groups. I can't decide if this is good or bad.)
In my country Germany the system is that every party above 5% can send representatives according to their percentage of votes. Then there are districts, who have to have size of approximately 250.000 inhabitants with German citizenship, who send a representative of the party with the most votes.
There a laws in place to not seperate counties, towns and cities when district lines have to be redrawn.
It's a bit simplified of course.
The point of representatives is that they each represent a small portion of the population. If you remove districts, then who are house members representing?
Indeed that's the intention, but in practice gerrymandering often leads to the opposite outcome where urban cores are divided up with large rural areas to suppress one side's votes.
See Utah's districts for the most obvious example of this. It would be logical to group Salt Lake City in one district, Provo + some suburbs in another, then the rural areas in the remaining districts. But instead the city is divided evenly such that each part of the city is in a different district, with every district dominated by large rural areas.
Obligatory mention of CGP Grey and his fantastic animal kingdom voting series: https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=Mky11UJb9AY
I love that video. One awesome solution he brings up is letting math draw the district lines, specifically the shortest-split line method. There's also an updated version of the method called Impartial Automatic Redistricting, that uses an approach similar to SSLM, but will only make cuts along the boundaries of census blocks (the smallest geographic unit used by the Census Bureau) to avoid cutting towns/neighborhoods in half, although it can create some odd results sometimes.
However, I think both of these would currently be illegal in the US under the Voting Rights Act for not taking minority representation into account. That is one downside to these methods, even though they're probably still an upgrade compared to the heavily-gerrymandered system in the US. So in the US's current system, the algorithms would have to be updated to somehow take that into account.
There are also a few other neat district drawing rules on Wikipedia that he didn't cover which are worth a read.
And Alpha Phoenix demonstrating how to produce rigged boundaries that look natural and not suspicious:
It's almost like the idea that representation based on land instead of based on people is flawed to begin with.
We were never going to do representation by population. We barely got the southern colonies to agree to apportionment with land. (This was the 3/5ths compromise.)
Not sure what you mean, get rid of districts? If you break up the population into groups then you get a geographic area.
In the USA, politicians chose the voters!
I read this in a Russian accent.
Should probably read it in a Texan accent
Both sides have had opportunities to make it illegal and neither have done it. I wonder why.
Because you never were a democracy
I'm not USA or from USA.
lol idiot
Because if you have the power to make it illegal, by definition, the old system worked for you (you won), so why would you change it?
It's cynical as all hell, but that's how it works.
I mean yeah but it feels stupider to me. Like bumping your head on something repeatedly then seeing somebody else bump their head, laugh at them and then bump your own head again. Political slapstick.
Simply vote for the one who's not supporting it the least to push them towards actually supporting it at all.
The United States is not a nation anymore. It’s a corporation. It’s also 100% corrupt. When will people come to terms with this? As long as most people are in denial of this, it will always be so.
Fun fact, the term for running a nation like a corporation is fascism.
Well it’s already been this way for like 20 years almost. It’s been forming for many decades, but it’s a done deal.
You guys are entering the late decadence phase as already experienced in the Roman Empire
Not exactly, but similar. The dynamics of the haves and have-nots are different because of the sheer numbers. But we are at a point where if just a certain amount more of the wealth is shifted to the oligarchs, then the entire system will collapse.
I’ve already gotten a three day ban on Reddit for making certain statements, so I’ll just state my opinion that the only way to stop this is to mortify a few billionaires. But aside from that, the problem is apathy, complacency, and lack of unity. This is why they came up with all the petty divisive “issues” which are really not issues. This is why the Orange Feces-Man did that whole mask thing. Because if people were united and everyone felt they were on the same side, there would be rebellion - nay, revolution. It’s happened in the past many, many, many times around the world through history. But I don’t think they ever had the sheer magnitude of distractions that we have today. Bread and Circuses vs Streaming, social media, entertainment more than all the humans of the earth could collectively consume. THAT, the Romans did not have at their disposal to weaponize.
Yeah, a common pattern in pseudo democracies like Hungary...
Also Japan, India, Malaysia.
Even the UK has covert influence from politics on district drawing tho officially its “independent commission”.
I will never understand how the highest number of votes isn't winning. Bucha cheatin ass bitches
Well, it's a complicated issue. Let's assume there's a state where all but an area of 10 blocks votes for candidate X. If that area happens to be split between several cities, the people living there are SOL as their vote is basically useless. Gerrymandering allows them to have a say in what goes on. But yes, as with everything, corruption ruins it.
What? Without districts and zones, people vote individually. Majority wins. Pretty basic. Keep everything else the same, voting zones, districts, whatever, where people go, but count it as a PERSON no part of a preconfigured cheated group.
Or just do mail in ballots with online tracking that it was received. Done. Majority wins. No electoral college or other bs.
With all the shady shit the US does that other countries don't seems like majority in US was designed to fail against money.
This way it doesn't matter that you live or moved to an opposing zone, you still vote and count towards your vote, not a small group.
Integrity is most common in other countries, but not in the united states.
Pay more attention to home friend, Europe is sliding into corruption hand in hand with us. But that would get in the way of nationalism wouldn't it?
Good take!!
why not count each person instead to avoid the issue entirely
Because then the rich wouldn't be able to control everything
I'm not sure that would make much difference. When you control the media companies (including social media), you control what people see and hear. When you control what people see and here, you control what they believe and how they act, to a large extent.
Which is not to say that it wouldn't be an improvement, just that it wouldn't solve that particular problem. At least not directly. Perhaps it would make it easier to implement systemic changes we'd need to truly address it.
Jeff Bezos didn't buy the Washington Post out of a love for journalism, that's for damned sure.
Well, each vote is counted. Gerrymandering affects (federal level in the US) only the House of Representatives, and districts are drawn (ideally) proportional to population. How those lines are drawn are not and cannot be objective; Gerrymandering is when that subjectivity allows for bias.
Here in Brazil, one person means one vote, no districting, no gerrymandering, none of this things, one vote for the president is one vote, one vote for your state senator is one vote, one vote for your deputy is one vote for them and their party (in this part it's weird, but makes sense that the politician also represents their party, but creates effects like "party gerrymandering").
Bolsonaro went into house arrest yesterday, so this could mean something.
So what, one representative for all those people?
The more I hear about this Jerry Mander fella, the less I care for him.
You jest, but it was named after a person:
The term "gerrymander" originated in 1812 from the redrawing of Massachusetts state senate election districts under Governor Elbridge Gerry. The newly shaped districts, particularly one in Essex County, were said to resemble a mythological salamander. Federalist party members, critical of the practice, coined the term "Gerry-mander" (later shortened to gerrymander) by combining Gerry's name with "salamander"
Fuck you Gerry, fuck you and your fucking madering
Where do we draw the line?
I say #2, specifically because it can be done mathematically, as opposed to trying to agree on some definition of "fairness" that isn't completely different for every office and doesn't have to be wholly redistricted every election as a consequence.
Say, something like least split line. Basically, if you have an even number of seats for a region, draw the shortest length line that splits the region into two regions of equal population. If you have an odd number of seats > 1, then draw the shortest line that splits the region based on number per seat given one side gets the "extra" seat (for example, for 5 seats you'd split so that one side is 2/3 of the other side and give 3 seats to one side and 2 to the other). Repeat the process for each region created by these lines until each region represents one seat. If there are multiple shortest lines, you the one closest to a NS axis. The extra seat always goes to the west side of the line.
I'll caveat this by saying that I detest gerrymandering and think it's one of the roots of the decline of the US political systems.
That being said, I'm going to answer a question you might not have even asked with a bunch of information that doesn't answer things better than "it's complicated."
The easiest "fair" way to divide up districts is based on equal polygons (say squares that are XX miles/km on an edge, for simplicity's sake). The issue is that this doesn't take into account population gradients due to terrain and zoning, or cultural/ethnic clusters. So, on its face it looks reasonable but you'll end up with districts that cover a city with 1 million people of diverse cultural makeup standing equal with a district of 1000 people that are culturally/ethnically homogenous. Not actually fair.
So, you can try to draw irregular shapes and the next "fair" way to try and do that is to equalize population. Now you quickly devolve into a ton of questions about HOW to draw the districts to be inclusive and representative of the people in the overall area you're trying to subdivide.
Imagine a fictional city with a cultural cluster (Chinatown in many American cities for example), a river, a wealthy area, a low income area, and industrial/commercial areas with large land mass and low resident populations.
How do you fairly draw those lines? You don't want to disenfranchise an ethnic minority by subdividing them into several districts, you might have wealthier living on the river, you might have residents with business oriented interests in the industrial areas AND low income... It quickly becomes a mess.
A "fair" districting can look gerrymandered if you're trying to enfranchise separate voting blocs in proportion to their actual population.
The problem is that politicians play this song and dance where they claim they're trying to be fair (until recently in Texas where GOP said the quiet part out loud and just said they want to redraw lines to get more seats) but in reality they are setting up districts that subdivide minority blocs into several districts that disenfranchise their voting interests.
It's disgusting, it's a clown show. But none of OPs photos are representative of what a good district looks like, because every location is different and there's likely an incredibly small number of locations that would divide that cleanly, if any.
So, it's complicated. Needs to be independently managed outside politics as best as possible and staffed by smart people and backed up by good data.
At least half his base has WOKE up. The other half still under the cult trance.. keep it alive and he'll be gone next election gerymand.be dammed
Ah yes, because there are only two parties.
This is entirely an emergent property of FPTP voting. Just do PPV or something, smh my head.
smh my head
yes.
Not necessarily of two-party systems or FPTP, I think this is a property of single-member districts in general. If you have multi-member districts (say 4 or 5 representatives per district) this becomes much less effective. Statewide PR solves this by removing districts, which for most people isn't ideal.
Yeah, just get the winner of a 2-party FPTP system to change the rules that got them elected and instead put in place a PPV system that will ensure they never again get a majority. ezpz
Most sane countries leave electoral boundaries to an independent commission
Most sane countries just count the total votes, making the boundaries not matter
Gerrymandering is the reason I get upset when people assume all texans/southerners are hateful hicks. Lived there for years and the right/left split is pretty balanced, even leaning left on many big issues, in most of the area I've frequented. It's just that poorer areas are rigged to fail and the powers that be have been running dirty campaigns for longer than many of us have been alive.
Just this last cycle, an old friend in the area received two different mail ads for (iirc) Ted "Zodiac" Cruz. One of them was in english and the other spanish. The english one was, for the most part, "honest" (as much as these types can be called honest, I mean) about his platform, while the spanish one explicitly lied in a way that made him seem like he was trying to benefit the immigrant community. Extremely fucked up and not too uncommon, according to a few inter-generational sources. That plus how jurisdictions are divided has made it extremely difficult for the left to get any major wins for the last handful of decades+. The south is even less ruled by the people than the rest of the US and the many decent people just trying their best to survive out there get shit on for what their oppressors choose all the time.
Sorry for the rant and tbc, there are also tons of shitheads out there too. Its just not like what many outsiders assume it is, and everything about the situation pisses me off something rancid.
republicans always use the 4th one, and they make it more convoluted each time to adjust for population growth or loss, im guessing thats why they keep redrawing them, because smaller towns or cities often get so low in population overtime.
Why do votes need to be done by district? Just do it statewide
The purpose is to have the people of smaller areas represented by an individualized Congress member. So the people in say the backwoods of California, aren't being spoken for by all big city people from LA/San Fran etc. When something is going on in your district, you are supposed to have someone who is empathetic to your cause and familiar to it. Then they bring that to the house and make the argument for you.
Aka, when someone brings up a federal code change proposition that will bankrupt the main source of jobs in your town, your legislature is supposed to go to bat, not fall in line and let your town die. 200 jobs being lost doesn't sound like much to a large city, but in a town of 2,000 people that's game over
Good point but for presidential elections, electrical districts don't make any sense. You could just use the total votes for the whole state to allocate electoral votes. Also, if the districts are being manipulated to provide a skewed election result then are the districts really groups of people with similar needs?
This will lead to the majority of the state getting full say and suppressing minority views. This can be political, racial, etc.
California has a large Republican population. If it goes state wide they get zero voice as the full state will go blue.
These days I'm kinda fine with that, but in principle this is wrong. The same suppression logic can be spread to ethnic groups, etc.
From reading the comments of others I'll say it seems like I'm pretty uninformed about how the actual process works. But what i meant was that if there are 6 electoral votes and each candidate wins 50% if the votes in the state then they both get 3 electrical votes. If there are 8 electoral votes and someone wins 27% if the vote they get 2 votes, not all or nothing
Because the concerns of farmers in California's central valley are different from the people in Hollywood.
Right, but without districts you could have ranked choice voting so the farmers in central California can vote for candidates that they want to represent them and all of their votes should be able to elect those candidates. Meanwhile, people who vote in other regions should have enough votes to elect candidates of their choosing.
This is kinda if topic, but why does the US have term limits for the presidency, but not all the other major positions?
In the original Constitution, there are no limits for any of them. George Washington made it a tradition not to seek a third term, but it wasn't actually enshrined into law until ~150 years later.
They focussed more on term length
While these don’t seem to be working right, anyone proposing changes needs to understand what they were trying to do and not make it worse trying to fix another aspect
It was added for the president with Roosevelt. Likely because the president has much more power than a single congressman.
Oh I knew it happened then, but I don't really follow the reasoning.
I am glad it affects Trump, but I think Obama might still be president of he was ever elected (he may never have run as the world would have been very different anyways)
Hmmm, interesting choice of colors, considering which famously colored party is currently in the news for aggressively gerrymandering...
and the current party using the 4th one the most.
https://www.cnn.com/2025/07/31/politics/gerrymandering-texas-republicans-analysis
Texas Republicans are apparently going big with their brazen attempt to redraw the state’s congressional maps in the middle of the decade, outside of the normal redistricting process.
A draft map released Wednesday would add three new districts that would have voted for President Donald Trump in 2024. That would mean 79% of the state’s districts (30 out of 38) would have backed the president compared to his 56% share of the vote in the state.
It would also put two House Democrats who won Trump districts in significantly more danger in 2026.
The proposed map is intended to help the GOP hold on to the House — where they have a historically narrow majority and history suggests Democrats are very likely to pick up seats — in the midterm elections. The map could help Republicans flip five seats, significantly raising the bar for a Democratic takeover of the chamber.
All of which has set off a predictable round of whataboutism on the right. Yes, Texas Republicans are going for the bare knuckles on this one. But what about all those egregious Democratic gerrymanders? Both sides play this game, right?
Yes, both sides gerrymander. But that doesn’t mean they are equal-opportunity offenders.
** Republicans pretty clearly benefit more from gerrymandering, and there’s an increasingly strong case to be made that they go further in using the tools available to them. ** Gambits like what Texas is doing are rare, and it’s been Republicans who have led the charge.
But this is the subject of plenty of debate, and there’s a school of thought that gerrymandering has become effectively a wash.
Some analysts point to recent election results that show the percentage of House seats each side wins these days more or less matches their share of the nationwide popular vote for the House.
Republicans, for example, won about 51.3% of the two-party vote in 2024. And 51.3% of House districts is about 223 seats. They won 220 seats.
In fact, these numbers have tracked closely over the last four elections. While there was just a three-seat gap in 2024, it was only two seats in each of the previous three elections. Neither side is winning a significantly disproportionate number of seats.
But just because the seat totals so closely mirror the overall vote shares doesn’t necessarily mean gerrymandering didn’t have an impact – or that one side or the other didn’t go to more extremes to try and secure the seats they won.
The ways in which populations are distributed matters greatly, for instance – particularly if one side’s voters are a lot more concentrated. Just because a state is competitive doesn’t mean that a “fair” map would be a 50-50 one. Generally speaking, “fair” districts are thought to group people with similar interests or backgrounds, and respect existing geographic boundaries. Sometimes in order to get that 50-50 split or even a narrow advantage for your side, you have to get pretty creative.
In addition, gerrymandering can be a risky game. A really extreme gerrymander could backfire if your effort to create as many favorable districts as possible spreads your voters too thin and you wind up losing seats. (Some have wagered this could happen to Republicans in Texas, particularly if the GOP can’t replicate Trump’s big 2024 gains with Hispanic voters.)
If the results of that gerrymander weren’t as lopsided as envisioned, does it really mean it wasn’t an extreme gerrymander?
This reinforces why you can’t just look at seat totals and vote shares. You really need to look at individual maps and how aggressively they’re drawn. This is, of course, a somewhat subjective exercise that depends on what factors you look at. But some experts have attempted to do that.
The Gerrymandering Project at Princeton University, which evaluates the maps holistically, gives a “D” or an “F” rating to slight majorities of maps drawn by Republicans and those drawn by Democrats.
PlanScore, spearheaded by well-known academics, finds that more maps have a bias toward Republicans than Democrats across a number of metrics.
These PlanScore numbers, too, come with caveats.
One is that, in about half of states, the map-drawing process wasn’t fully controlled by one party or another – either because the state has split legislative control, or because courts or redistricting commissions do it. So even if more maps favor Republicans, it’s not just because they drew them that way.
The second is that a big reason more maps appear to have a GOP bias is that Republicans simply get more opportunities to gerrymander. They have full control of more states because they hold the “trifecta” of the governor’s mansion and both chambers of the state legislature. In the most recent round of post-Census redistricting, Republicans controlled the drawing of 177 districts (estimates on this vary slightly), compared to just 49 for Democrats, according to a 2022 report from the left-leaning Brennan Center for Justice at New York University’s law school.
(Part of the reason Republicans have more control is their superior standing in state governments and the fact that blue states have been more likely to outsource this process to redistricting commissions.)
The Brennan Center has also noted that Republicans appear to benefit from state courts having a more laissez-faire approach to partisan gerrymandering.
All told, the center found 11 Republican-drawn maps that had extreme partisan bias, compared to four drawn by Democrats, ahead of the 2024 elections.
Which brings us to the latest developments. They certainly reinforce the idea that Republicans are more ruthless about using this power.
The reason Texas is so controversial isn’t just that Republicans are drawing such a slanted map; it’s mostly when they have chosen to do it – in the middle of the decade, outside the normal post-Census redistricting process.
Maps are sometimes redrawn after that post-Census period, but usually it’s because courts force states to do so. When state legislatures have done this of their own volition, it’s been Republicans in charge.
Depending on how you slice it, we’ve seen three or four modern attempts like this at mid-decade redistricting.
The GOP did this in Texas and Colorado in 2003 (though the Colorado map was struck down) and in Georgia in 2005. They also redrew the maps in North Carolina in 2023 after a newly conservative-leaning state Supreme Court reversed an earlier decision and opened the door to partisan gerrymandering.
State legislative expert Tim Storey told the Washington Post back in 2003 that the strategy appeared unprecedented at the time.
And while Democrats are talking about a tit-for-tat in which they would do the same thing in states like California and New York, that would be a response to the GOP’s own gambit. Not to mention, Democrats would also face major legal and political hurdles in these states to make that a reality.
Indeed, Republicans seem to be leaning in on a mid-decade redistricting arms race, knowing they have superior capabilities and can take things further — just like they have before. _
Which is it?
Number 2 is the actual ideal, not number 1. Number 1 represents, "good," gerrymandering that politicians argue for, but it really only serves them. They get to keep highly partisan electorate that will reelect them no matter what, which means they can be less responsive to the will of their voters. They only have to worry about primary challengers, which aren't very common, and can mostly ignore their electorate without issue.
It's also important to note that this diagram is an oversimplification that can't express the nuances of an actual electorate. While a red and blue binary might be helpful for this example, a plurality of voters identify as independents, and while most of them have preferences towards the right or left, they are movable. The point is that actual voters are more nuanced and less static than this representation.
Number 2 is how distracting would work in an ideal world; it doesn't take into account political alignment at all, but instead just groups people together by proximity. A red victory is unlikely, but still possible if the blue candidate doesn't deliver for his constituents and winds up with low voter turnout. It also steers politicians away from partisan extremism, as they may need to appeal to a non-partisan plurality. That being said, when literal fascists are attempting number 3, we'll have to respond in kind if we want any chance of maintaining our democracy, but in the long term, the solution is no gerrymandering, not, "perfect representation," gerrymandering.
the fascists aren't attempting 3, they've already been doing it for decades. now they just want to do even more, because it's open fascism season so why be coy about it.
Everyone's been doing either one or three for decades, the fascists are just more effective at it. What's changed is that they're doing it in a non-census year with the explicit goal of changing the outcome of the 2026 midterms. The only states with have unbiased districts are the places where people have passed ballot measures against partisan districting, but Democrats have been just as happy as Republicans to pull this shit.
2 and 3 1 and 2 are indistinguishable if you don't take political alignment into account. What counts as a line or a column in real life? You need to group/sort people by something in order to draw any of those lines.
Edit: somehow I missed the actual numbers in the image and counted them starting from the sample, so when I said 2 and 3 I was thinking of 1 and 2.
Do you mean one and two? Two and three are clearly different, as three has no pattern other than disenfranchisement. I agree that one and two are both valid ways to divide the squares visually, but the text is stating that one is, "perfect," and two is, "compact but unfair," implying that the goal should be getting each political group some representation. That is still allowing politicians to pick their constituents, and even if it's more fair than three, it still built to serve the candidates, not the voters. Compact (i.e. a system that divides districts entirely by geography and population, without consideration towards demographics or political alignment) should be the actual desired outcome.
The figures only make sense in “first past the post” (or “winner takes it all”) systems.
The last one would be unfair in most systems using districts.
The last one might be the most fair, if it were based on criteria other than voting tendencies. Complex districts are meant to let different voices be heard, but what those voices are makes it challenging.
Let me make a hypothetical scenario. Consider a state where half the people are urban and half are rural, and has two representatives. Those groups has different priorities so districts drawn only for simple shapes means that someone’s voice is not being heard. It would be better to have one representative elected by urban voters and one by rural voters. Now picture those urban areas following a winding river because that follows historical settlement patterns. The most fair choice might be a complex shape following population density to result in one representative speaking for rural voters and one speaking for urban voters, but indistinguishable from gerrymandering.
Of course that same exact result might just be a proxy for political affiliation, which is unfair. This is why preventing gerrymandering is impossible: whether it’s good or bad depends on what you’re trying to do not how you do it
From my understanding "winner takes it all" is on state level, so the winner gets all the votes people. I only know this from the US.
"First past the post" is when there is one elected person per district and they need a relative majority which is also true in the UK.
In other countries like France, you have more than one round or need an absolute majority. Still gerrymanderable but not "first past the post".
This is what the US has, for the most part. It makes it extremely difficult for ranked choice or similar to gain a foothold.
Cracking and packing
Stephen Harper, Pierre Poilievre and the CPC began the process of gerrymandering Canada to match GOP attempts in the states.
As example: in Vancouver you have a riding that is two physically distinct pieces of land that you have to travel through two other ridings to get to.
Even worse, google "Pierre Poutine".
Links to get people started on the 2011 one
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/2011_Canadian_federal_election_voter_suppression_scandal
The 2011 Canadian federal election voter suppression scandal (also known as the Robocall scandal, Robogate, or RoboCon) is a political scandal stemming from events during the 2011 Canadian federal election.[1][2][3][4][5][6] It involved robocalls and real-person calls that originated in the Conservative Party of Canada's campaign office in Guelph, Ontario. The calls were designed to result in voter suppression. Elections Canada and the Royal Canadian Mounted Police (RCMP) conducted investigations into the claims that calls were made to dissuade voters from casting ballots by falsely telling them that the location of their polling stations had changed.[7] Further possible electoral law violations were alleged as the evidence unfolded. Under the Canada Elections Act, it is an offence to willfully prevent, or endeavour to prevent, an elector from voting in an election.[8][9]
Do you have more context for the gerrymandering attempt? I don't remember that one, and web search is terrible now so I can't find more about it either.
In Canada, independent commissions handle the process, which makes gerrymandering much more difficult to get away with. An article discussing it:
https://www.vox.com/2014/4/15/5604284/us-elections-are-rigged-but-canada-knows-how-to-fix-them
"Independent commissions now handle the redistricting in every Canadian province"
Eventually, in 1955, one province — Manitoba — decided to experiment, and handed over the redistricting process to an independent commission. Its members were the province’s chief justice, its chief electoral officer, and the University of Manitoba president. The new policy became popular, and within a decade, it was backed by both major national parties, and signed into law.
Independent commissions now handle the redistricting in every province. "Today, most Canadian ridings [districts] are simple and uncontroversial, chunky and geometric, and usually conform to the vague borders of some existing geographic / civic region knowable to the average citizen who lives there," writes JJ McCullough.
“Of the many matters Canadians have cause to grieve their government for, corrupt redistricting is not one of them.” Hoffman concurs, writing, “The commissions have been largely successful since their implementation.”
Is there even a way to mathematically divide up land area into completely fair districts? I heard somewhere that it wasn't possible.
there are generally a couple (probably more but modern democracies afaik have settled on 2) ways of dividing up government: representative (you as a person living in an area elect someone to represent you) and proportional (you as a citizen of the country elect a party to represent your preferences)
rather than dividing land area (representative aka districts) to elect individuals, there are voting systems that take proportionality into account… parties put forward candidates based on their proportional vote (ie the party leader would get in first, and then they have a list of candidates who get chosen based on their % of the vote)… they don’t represent a district/area, but the party… so the idea is that if a minority party gets 10% of the vote, they should have 10% of the representation - districts be damned… philosophy is more important than land… this leads to a whole lot of minor parties having to form a coalition government
i live in australia, and we don’t have proportional representation (we have a party… kind… called the coalition but that’s… different… it’s complex… ignore it… afaik germany and nz have proportional representation: they’re probably the best places i know of to look for these systems: parliaments composed of many minor parties)… we do have ranked choice voting, so we’re kind of a middle ground: ranked choice without proportional representation still leads to a 2 party system, but imo theres debatable up sides and down sides from representative to proportional (proportional systems can lead to a lot of nothing - small parties that are technically the majority but can’t agree on anything and not able to get anything done)
i thiiiink i’ve heard that there are systems that combine proportional and representative (actually, i think our australian senate is proportional and our house of representatives is representative - our HOR is pretty 2 party and our senate has a about 5-6 minor parties) but this is where my knowledge gets fuzzy
first past the post is the root of all evil: there are no up sides, there are only down sides… it causes politics to be horrible (ranked choice you have to worry about not just winning outright but also being likeable - you have to make everyone like you, because you want them to put you 2nd, 3rd, etc because 2nd preference might make you win!), it causes extremism, hate, forced 2 party (in the worst possible way: extremist 2 party), and absolutely no opportunity for change
Illegality is slowly being erased in america
It bothers me that the graphic lists red-then-blue but there text lists blue-then-red. It's inconsistent to how we read the information and makes it confusing to process.
...like gerrymandering
They listed the majority first. That's all they did here.
gerrymandering goes both ways: it can make a majority a total victory, and a minority also a victory… i think building up is a good way of displaying that: you can go from a representative minority to a total win, and a representative minority to a minority win depending on how you draw the lines
the point being to show that gerrymandering is more influential than the vote, regardless of which “side” you’re on… it’s bad for everyone
Where text lists blue-then-red?
In the image attached to the post.
this assumes a left to right interpretation which is not universal, the graphic in a sense is not absolutely red then blue
the text could be positioned left and right like the graphic does, but I found it natural to list the larger number first and the smaller second - so not everyone feels the same as you about the graphic being confusing
this assumes a left to right interpretation which is not universal
While this is true, the graphic is in English using the Latin script. The Latin script is, as you might know, a left to right script which triggers a left to right interpretation of the whole thing.
Honestly, it didn't trigger me at all but it would be more logical to also put the bigger color first (read: on the left)
Our nation will continue circling the toilet until gerrymandering is outlawed.
And with how many stupids there are here that are scared of change, even when presented with facts proving it's better for them, the odds of things getting better are pretty slim.
WE know. It’s the pithed Fox News and Joe Rogan fuckwit demographic that has no fucking clue.
Eh, the democrats seem to be getting back on board with it too now. Most Americans at least have a vague concept of gerrymandering. They just choose to ignore it when it benefits their side.
It's also illegal in the united states.
It isn't actually, not in all cases. There is nothing in the constitution preventing it and the Supreme Court and state courts have said that there is no mechanism in place to either identify it objectively, nor to remedy it if found, with a few exceptions. The biggest exceptions are where it violates the Voting Rights Act or otherwise demonstrably discriminates on the basis of racial demographics (a constitutionally protected class), in which case it can be kicked back to the legislature with the directive to do it again but try to be less racist this time.
Don't forget that if you say it's because the minority group votes against you then it's officially political and not racist. Thanks SCOTUS.
I’d love to see what the vote would look like if we broke the gerrymandering systems today. Democrats are just now talking about doing their own fuckery to counter republicans, but what if we just “didnt” have them, which side wins?
The limit (with infinite districts made of infinite people) is theoretically 1/4 support, in a 2 party system, with a choice made from separately decided districts. If you add another level of districts, it could be 1/8, another would be 1/16, and so on.
In practice you can't make a district with actually 100% support of the opposing party, and you need to leave a little room for error in the districts you plan to win. Also there aren't an infinite number of districts lol
There is a board game! There's also a virtual version of Mapmaker on Board Game Arena
It is quite fun despite the depressing context.
I have this game and I love it, abstracts and lecturing people about obscure subjects are two of my favorite things
”Perfect representation” only works if everyone votes. Blue can win with 3 votes against 20 votes.
yeah no, jerry foreman explained better
Replace all politicans with AI first and then do everyone else. How difficult can it be to create an Agent that lies and steals from everyone?
As soon as we get a Democrat president let's just get rid of it forever.
They've had plenty of opportunities and haven't done it.
Unfortunately whichever party is in power is incentivized to be in favor of biasing the process toward themselves, both parties choose to keep gerrymandering even though it's obviously voter suppression.
This is also why neither of them will support ranked choice/instant run-off voting.
A democrat like... Obama?
Lol Voting is irrelevant Prepare for the country to be Texafornicated
No no, it's Russia you see.
Gerrymandering and throwing your opponents out the window are two different things, even if it leads to similar outcomes at first glance.
A Power Duopoly is better than a Power Monopoly, but not all that much better.
Think Cartel vs Monopoly.
LOL you've really got brainbugs. Munch munch munch
Nice, repost of a classic repost from the reddit front page
What if everybody just votes thier opinion on a set of issues. The cadadites have to declare thier opinion on the same set. When the voting is done, the percentages are calculated for all the issues. Then a computer program picks a list of cadidates such the they together match the distribution of the voters.
Three problems:
1, it is actually less complex for the voter. Right now they don't kniw much about who/what they are voting for because all the info they get is marketing. But a question about homelessness or crime they probably feel more confident in thier answer. Plus many people don't vote because thier options are all liars. The reps in this case don't have to be popular, so they don't have to lie. 2 in very small states it might be tough, but an algorithm can find the closest match by simply trying all the combinations. For a computer that will be a very simple task. And it could even print them all out for anyone to validate. 3 this for sure is the hardest part. Probably some kind of public proposal and polling combo would be needed. Btw, at work we were told to use numbers instead of bullets because it makes referring to a point much easier.
This should be a minimum three member mixed proportional district resulting in 2 blue, 1 red
Edit: I can’t add to three. Fixed numbers
So, "perfect representation" is when one side wins that does not represent 40% of the votes?
When there is one seat, two parties, and you're using First Past the Post voting (which is a terrible voting system that inevitably causes the two party divide), yes. They perfect out come is majority win. When distributing multiple district seats, proportional representation is the perfect outcome, which that also acheives.
When there is one seat, two parties, and you’re using First Past the Post voting (which is a terrible voting system that inevitably causes the two party divide), yes
So we can agree the system is inherently bad at representation?
Sounds more like that outcome is the "least bad" rather than "perfect".